Ok, So i'm swapping removable hard drives around my systems trying to get that nazi Win2k installed, and now I've placed a hard disk with Windows XP on it back into it's orginal machine (it never went into another machine) and all of a sudden it won't boot. I get: Invalid system disk Replace the disk, and then press any key arg! I can boot from a floppy and see the drive (C and all the files on it, it just seems to have lost its system boot files. Anyone know how to sys a Windows XP drive? UPDATE: - FDISK /mbr did not work. - The partion with XP on it is the primary, it's active, and FAT32.
Make sure you do not have a "Non System" floppy disk in your floppy drive. Remove any floppy disks from your drive.Make sure the connections to the hard drive are good.
Thanks for the input, but let's, recap here. I'm a programmer, I know all about the boot order, boot disks, blah, blah, blah. I built these machines. It's something else.
Yes I figured that.Okay I have had this problem with XP when I have changed the slave drive even when XP was on the master drive.I only get it fixed from recovery console.If you can't enter "R" on first screen then choose to install,accept the license agreement and on the next screen you will again be offered to press "R" for recovery,choose "R" at this time.It will lose the XP updates but your data will be intact.
I just remembered what I did. I came to the machine this morning and it was unresposive with a blank screen. So I had to power it down. I finally booted from the CD into repair mode. Checkdisk says that "The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems." Looks like it's toast for now, but I'm still open to suggestions.
I suppose you have checked to make sure the connectors are still firmly connected -inside- the removable hard disk enclosure? if so, for grins, swap the hd into one of the other hd enclosures, and see if it works
Yeah, just for giggles I replaced the cables, that didn't change anything. I can read the drive contents if I boot from a floppy, so that tells me that the drive is pretty much working, it's just the boot stuff that's messed up. I'm gonna try footfix from the repair console next.
fdisk /mbr ( from a boot floppy of course) worked for me in the past but this was on a dual boot drive with red hat and windows xp now i run red hat on my spare 250 gig
Ah, I booted the XP CD and chose "R" for the Recovery Console, ran FIXBOOT and it said the boot sector was corrupted, it fixed that and then rebooted, it found a drive to boot from! It now reported that NTLDR is missing, I've heard of that before and seen some pages that show how to fix it, so I'm off to do that...
Yeah, I did the whole NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI, FIXBOOT, FIXMBR, SCANDISK, and BOOTCFG stuff, still won't boot. I still get: NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart . Interestingly enough, FDISK shows the partition as now being FAT12, yes FAT twelve. I think I'm pretty much screwed.
ouch fat 12 time for delpart then fdisk then format c: /u /s then next time use ghost after you get it up and running and make an image of it
If you receive the "NTLDR is missing" message, boot to a Windows XP CD, then press "R" to enter the Recovery Console. Copy X:i386NTLDR & X:NTDETECT.COM (Where X is your CD drive) to C: Reboot
I'll wager that you don't have the 6-disk set of boot volume restore disks laying around, do you? Only thought I've got for you. Sorry if you've already tried this. Good Luck.
No, it's a standard XP Pro install CD. It's not a critial machine, this one is just for testing, so there's no real need for retaining any data. I just wanted to see if I could fix it in case it ever happened again. I was going to get SpinRite (http://www.grc.com) and see if I could fix it with that, but now after doing multiple things, most of the folders are gone and scandisk provided me with over 200 check files, so I'm concluding that it's gone now.
if you ever figure out what went wrong, clue us in, if nothing else it sounds like it'd be interesting reading...
Use Spinrite 8 from Gibson Research to fix the buggar, may take a day or so to find and repair all the damaged sectors. Works great!
Did not see this post before I responded to the last one. If one uses scandisk first, to address a damaged drive, forget using Spinrite as one will find the drive's folder structure (data) hammered during the eval session with scandisk. All those useless CHK files are the results! ;P I am a former COMPAQ field service resource coordinator. An observation: Some of MicroSoft's FREE tools make more messes than fixes. ;P
